A Gauntlet of Mortal Danger (AKA Life)

By Shamus Posted Monday Dec 22, 2008

Filed under: Rants 38 comments

Doctors warn of an “Epidemic” of Wii injuries. Wasn’t it just five minutes ago they were warning us about the epidemic of corpulent drooling television-watchers. I distinctly remember dire predictions that we were rocketing towards a grim reality where we’re all too fat to fit in the booth at Denny’s and we drop dead of a heart attack at 27. Now a few of us have tried to get up and move gently in place, which is placing us in a new and equally horrifying peril.

Truly we are hemmed in on all sides by relentless danger from which there can be no escape. We have no choice but to be afraid of everything, at all times.

 


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38 thoughts on “A Gauntlet of Mortal Danger (AKA Life)

  1. Spearhead says:

    so said Wade the Duck… didn’t know he nowadays does work for doctors…

  2. Danel says:

    It’s probably better to read this as “Journalists needing to fill pages seized desperately upon a calm warning from one or two doctors, somewhere, and proceeded to blow it out of all proportion”.

    These are British newspapers anyway – at least they seem to be listening to actual doctors this time rather than just taking it directly from the press release of some company’s new exercise doohickey. And we know it’s not the Daily Mail, because they’d have to tell us whether playing on the Wii causes or cures cancer.

  3. Kevin says:

    Other items that were going to lead to the dissolution of society and the ruin of us all:

    radio
    interracial marriage
    Porn
    Atheists
    fast food
    Wal Mart
    automobile exhaust
    the communist Democrats
    the fascist Republicans
    Saturday morning cartoons
    Grand Theft Auto
    prayer in school
    no prayer in school
    dancing
    marijuana
    the gays
    women voters
    black voters
    Catholics

    With all these things in our society today that will certainly lead to our immediate damnation and devolution back to living in caves, it’s absolutely unfathomable that anyone can walk to the corner market without getting attacked by a pterodactyl and catching a fatal case of liver cancer from it. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go play my damn Wii and send my eternal soul to hell.

  4. Shamus says:

    Kevin: But they were right about dancing!

    (I was dancing with my wife yesterday, and now my back is punishing me for my impertinence.)

  5. Kevin says:

    LOL! You’re obviously going to hell… too!

  6. illiterate says:

    In other news — Exercising can lead to injury!

    Who knew?

    It’s especially a danger for those who aren’t used to exercising. I’m sure the more fitness oriented games have a “take it slow” option for those getting started.

  7. mockware says:

    Two words: Water Poisoning. I’ve decided if water can kill you, there probably isn’t anything that won’t. For some reason, that made me stop worrying about all the other stuff.

  8. kat says:

    They were right about WalMart, too. It is a fiendish invention for driving all the other businesses in a small town out, so that you have no choice but to go there and buy cheap Chinese crap, fight your way through the hordes of other frustrated, confused, and unhappy shoppers to the checkout line, and be checked out by a sad middle-aged woman who once had a real job, but the business went under, so now she must suffer through the travesty of working for one of America’s worst employers (WalMart).

    Not that I’m bitter or anything.

    In other news, doctors are required to be paranoid about this stuff. They’re *doctors*. They went to school for it and everything. And journalists went to school for making mountains out of molehills. Don’t hate them for doing their jobs, just pat them gently on the head, make sure they haven’t accidentally said anything important, and get on with your life.

  9. Apathy Curve says:

    As I get older, I’m starting to look at death not as the end, but rather as blessed relief from the endless chatter of journalists.

  10. maehara says:

    Ah, but They just hate telling us all about things that are bad for you.

    Take food, for example: if I only ever ate things which had no health scares associated with them, I’d be dead of starvation in about a fortnight. Which would at least get me away from listening to scare stories.

  11. Lethe says:

    I still don’t understand why there isn’t more hue and cry about the impending meteorite threat (http://tinyurl.com/65hv6e). I mean, I know I’ve spent the last week calculating the optimum angles for the meteorite deflection armor that I’m gonna install on my house once the parts get here…

  12. Leon says:

    Get up, they said. A little exercise won’t hurt, they said. But who’s laughing NOW? Good thing I ignored them.

    …would someone hand me the remote? I seem to be stuck in this chair.

  13. UtopiaV1 says:

    Gah, British doctors are generally stupid anyway, but at least it’s better than the American healthcare system, paying for treatment my ass…

    Oh, btw, your Walmart owns our Asda, so i guess we’re all going to hell too… well, i already was, I’m a liberal democrat voting atheist…

  14. Christian Groff says:

    This reminds me of a “You Can’t Do That On Television” skit where the mother served her family chocolate because she was taken in by all the health scares of food. This shows how annoying journalists can be because they don’t pay attention to the details. My patron saint, Alton Brown, addressed one of this health scares – mercury in fish – but then some “FDA agents” said that the mercury in fish is so small that it’s only a health risk to anyone who eats certain tuna while young, pregnant, or breasftedding. Since I’m none of those, this isn’t my concern.

    And I can see where playing the Wii could lead to injury. I know I’m going to be injured by flailing my Wiimote around like an idiot because I’m so badly out of shape I should be be hospitalized. *laughs* But I don’t flail the Wiimote.

  15. Evlkritter says:

    The decay of society is a slow and tedious process. If there were people actively trying to destroy it they would be frustrated by how slowly the damage spreads, and by how long society will endure in a beaten and bloody state. Using machines to exercise is only the most recent evil against society.

  16. Neil Polenske says:

    Yeah, and Papa Titus says don’t be a wussy!

  17. Aergoth says:

    Dihydrogen Monoxide probably belongs on that list. Right up there with Lolcats, Articles 18, 19 and 20 of the universal declaration of human rights and freedom, and perhaps the planetary status of pluto. Good thing they got that one.

  18. MPR says:

    Beware Dihydrogen Monoxide, the killer chemical that is all around us.
    http://www.dhmo.org/

  19. ArcoJedi says:

    Is “flailing the Wiimote” going to be the new dirty euphemism? It is? Good!

  20. Al Shiney says:

    @ Christian Groff: Another follower of my hero Alton! I fall down and worship with thee in a purely secular and platonic fashion. He also graduated from culinary school practically in my back yard. :)

    Back on topic, these doctors are obviously right, in spite of their British-ness. After raking a foot of snow off the entire roof of my house over the weekend and destroying my left shoulder in the process, I stupidly played like eleventy-billion games of Wii Sports Tennis and did the same thing to my right shoulder. Today I am a walking tree stump.

  21. Justin says:

    When all choices lead equally to death, what is to guide us at a crossroads, except whim? Doctors are giving us permission to do whatever we want!

  22. Ludov says:

    Wow…
    Sounds like…. here in Quebec :P

    I swear, if it isn’t the Nile virus and the mosquitoes carrying it supposedly, it was SARS. Or chicken pox. Or some new danaaaagerous entertainment for children that should be outlawed. Or sunburns/draught. Or ice on the roads with crap-a-tons government paid commercials telling us to adjust our driving for winter conditions…. with not even a speckle of salt(sodium?) on the roads to get that ice to melt and which would have probably cost less than those commercials in the first place.

    Or…. well, anything that’s easy to fear-monger upon but that doesn’t even has any impact most of the time(well… except for winter, except in this case they spend more resources fear-mongering than truly making the thing /safe/ or making /true/ efforts to).

    I mean…. we heard crap-ton on SARS when it killed but 40 people in toronto in the spans of… damn, a year? Months?

    Not too long after, it took us /months/ to hear about C.Difficile and the /hundreds/ of people it killed in public-funded hospitals in that same period. Then… that might be because the chief cause was insalubrity(most people never had it before and contracted it during surgery. I’ll let you do the maths) and how hospitals “let’s use antibiotics-for-every-fucking-things philosophy that offed all the bacterias which could have kept c.difficile in check without doing anything for it because of its resistance.

    Pardon for the rant. <.<;

    Though I guess it shows futile fear-mongering is everywhere, I guess.

  23. Sam says:

    Looks like our only solution left now it to stand quietly in one place and never move. Everything else can lead to death.

  24. theonlymegumegu says:

    “We have no choice but to be afraid of everything, at all times.”

    Man, the first thing I thought of when I read that was that there *is* such a thing as a healthy amount of fear. Then the 2nd thing I thought of was how doctors could twist *that* into a health scare. Then I remembered my old joke about my anti-life campaign built on the platform that 100% of things that are alive die, so this plague of life that is bringing a swath of death to the world must be eradicated. That’s my dark humor for the day, I think.

  25. Derek K. says:

    People who don’t move are 5x more likely to be attacked by squirrels

  26. Telas says:

    The solution?

    The Nerf Life ™ – It’s not dangerous, but it’s … not really that much fun, either.

    Hmm… gotta work on that slogan a bit.

    Seriously, I was talking about this with a guy I went to elementary/junior high/high school with, and he pointed out that over the course of ten or so years, there was not a semester during which someone in our class (of about 15-25 students) did not have a cast, crutches, or bandage. He said, “Worry about the children? Screw that, let’s worry about the lost childhood!”

    (“Paying for treatment my ass?” TANSTAAFL!)

  27. Luke Maciak says:

    I clicked on the link, and I saw bunch of people holding the Wiimotes the way you would hold a traditional controller. Is that supposed to be ironic or what?

  28. R4byde says:

    In other news, more American males between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five were killed in car collisions during this past year than there were casualties in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. So for health and safety reasons we should all enlist lads; you don’t want to get hit by a truck on freeway do you? ;)

  29. Dragonbane says:

    @R4byde: Curious: Total casualties, or American/military casualties? The two numbers are vastly different…

  30. ClearWater says:

    @Luke: I had a similar impression. My first thought at seeing that photograph was “you’re doing it wrong”. My second was “how are they going to get injured playing like that? They must be really out of shape. Or maybe the boy in the back is going to hit them over the head for their idiocy.”

  31. Katy says:

    @Luke: Maybe they’re playing Mario Kart? (Don’t you hold the Wiimote sideways for that?)

  32. KarmaDoor says:

    I can only think of four possible Wii games that require the remote to be held sideways:

    1) Mario Kart
    A relatively “casual-core” racer that likely requires buttons to be pressed occasionally.
    Nope. Wrong audience and probably the wrong grip.

    2) Super Smash Bros. Brawl
    A fairly hardcore button smashing fighter.
    Nope. Those adults probably wouldn’t even be in the room to watch for more than ten seconds.

    3) Metal Slug Anthology
    A hardcore platforming shooter. The remote’s buttons will be shown no mercy.
    Pffft… definitely not.

    4) Charge! from Wii Play
    A very casual and plodding cattle racer solely driven by tilting the Wii remote.
    BINGO! We have a winner!

  33. Anonymouse says:

    This just in, scientists have discovered a new and dangerous threat: life. Extensive studies have shown the participating in “life” has been shown to have a mortality rate of ONE HUNDRED PERCENT. This is astounding, ladies and gentleman. Although it can take many years for the effects to finally manifest, some die in just a few years of use.

    Congress and the President are working with the AMA to stamp out this terrible scourge.

  34. Argon says:

    So according to this, I should be GLAD that my brother broke our Wii? I had no idea.

  35. beno says:

    Yes, I’m really over hearing about all the different “risk factors” of injury or illness that we hear about these days. Especially since many of them are only a few percent increased risk on top of the inherent risk of living.

    It’s funny – my wife insists on buying unhomogenised milk because she read about a study that says that homogenised milk is a cancer risk or something, and yet she thinks nothing of going “hey look at that” while I’m driving on a long car trip. I mean do I actually have to find a study that says that distracting the driver is dangerous just to make the point?

  36. Evlkritter says:

    At the risk of being stupid and obnoxious I am going to try a strange experiment and see how long it takes for someone to notice I am posting on this page. I’ll probably forget about this before anyone figures it out, but hey, no reason not to.

    Wheeeeee! I am wasting memory! Look at this website!
    http://www.giantitp.com

  37. Evlkritter says:

    Since I don’t post very often. I probably won’t get much in the way of results.

  38. Evilkritter says:

    Yep, I don’t do this very often.

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